OTTAWA – When the Trudeau Liberals bring down their first budget on March 22, artfully dodging the Ides of March by a week, the most powerful person in cabinet will ultimately be Treasury Board President Scott Brison.

He will become the go-to money man, and no dosh can be dished out to any MP’s list of wishes, promises and cabinet mandate fulfilments unless it has his signature.

This makes Brison the big man on the Trudeau campus when it comes to defining which projects among the plethora of Liberal spending promises get the higher priority, and therefore which projects get the quickest influx of the billions that will be ultimately added to the federal deficit.

Sitting on his cheque book, in fact, will make Scott Brison the tallest person in the Liberal caucus.

The once-upon-a-time Progressive Conservative MP, who crossed the floor in 2003, oddly only four days after voting in favour of a merger between the PCs and the Canadian Alliance, will be the face of who decides the fate of our tax dollars, and who will consult with Finance Minister Bill Morneau to determine a priority sequence for the rollout.

But first he must run it by the person who, despite being behind the scenes, is truly the most important person on Parliament Hill when it comes to the dispensing of public money, and that is a bureaucrat with the seemingly unpronounceable name of Yaprak Baltacioglu.

Best attempts over the years has it as YAP-rak Bal-ti-CHOO-lu.

As Secretary to Treasury Board, it is Baltacioglu’s responsibility as that department’s chief bureaucrat to tell her elected boss, as well as all the other beggars in cabinet who come through his door that, if there is a magical money tree, there are not an infinite number of branches to be plucked unless the promised budgetary deficits have no ceiling.

The closest the public has ever gotten to know Yaprak Baltacioglu was in a Globe piece almost seven years ago when she was then deputy minister for Transport Canada and her second husband, Rob Fonberg, then deputy minister of National Defence (now retired), were cited in the headline as being Ottawa’s “new power couple.”

While that is all well and good, Baltacioglu refused to be interviewed for the piece — as did he — and they even asked their friends to evade any inquiries that came their way.

Official biography bumpf has the 55-year-old Baltacioglu born in Turkey, coming to Canada with her first husband when she was 21 and, unable to use her law degree from Istanbul University, then attending Carleton University to earn a master’s degree in public administration.

She joined the federal public service in 1989, was spotted early, and rose quickly through increasingly senior positions until landing as Secretary of the Treasury Board in 2012.

Where Baltacioglu really earned her chops, however, was in 2009 when the Harper government, knee-deep in the global recession, committed $4 billion to stimulate the economy and gave then Transportation and Infrastructure Minister John Baird the responsibility to get the money out the door as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Luckily, across the hall from his 29th floor office at Transport Canada, was his deputy minister, Yaprak Baltacioglu. And, at day’s end, the opposition could not find a single scandal or instance of mismanagement in what was then an unprecedented bout of government spending.

When the Conservatives needed to apply the brakes as the recession began to lift, the prime minister had Baltacioglu pack up her brilliance and moved her to Treasury Board to help then Treasury Board President Tony Clement begin the task of cost cutting.

With the Trudeau Liberals now promising to run deficits that could easily reach the $90-billion mark, according to the National Bank, Baltacioglu had best bring a calculator to meetings with Brison that has lots of battery power.

And maybe some heat liniment to ease the pain of the carpal tunnel syndrome that Brison will likely suffer from signing his name on so many “sunny ways” disbursements.

The taxpayers, on the other hand, will need extra-strength sedatives.

Bonokoski

Scott Brison and his magical deficit money tree

OTTAWA – When the Trudeau Liberals bring down their first budget on March 22, artfully dodging the Ides of March by a week, the most powerful person in cabinet will ultimately be Treasury Board President Scott Brison.

He will become the go-to money man, and no dosh can be dished out to any MP’s list of wishes, promises and cabinet mandate fulfilments unless it has his signature.

This makes Brison the big man on the Trudeau campus when it comes to defining which projects among the plethora of Liberal spending promises get the higher priority, and therefore which projects get the quickest influx of the billions that will be ultimately added to the federal deficit.

Sitting on his cheque book, in fact, will make Scott Brison the tallest person in the Liberal caucus.